You are a serious misanthrope. My wonderful Armenian divorce lawyer, as decent, intelligent, and skilled a lawyer and human being as one would be likely to meet, told me once that the jury system is the best thing to happen to the legal system -- and he clearly believed that wholeheartedly and passionately.
I'll take his word for it, rather than your (consistently) paranoid fantasies.
[WS:] Joanna, I strongly suggest what I actually wrote instead of reading into it things that are not there. To reiterate - the point I was making was the jury system is indeed a good thing when it is used to applying laws, but not so good when it is used to make them i.e. by selective enforcement of laws a particular group happens to support or oppose. For the latter we have another best things that happen to the legal system called elections and referenda (living in CA, you should be quite familiar with the latter.)
I do not think it is too paranoid to claim that there are many interest groups in the US who would like their own villains unpunished - corporate executives, militia and white supremacists, right to lifers, tax evaders and so on. I do not think that anyone on this list would want these folks to be able to "jury nullify" the laws prohibiting corporate crime, hate crime or intimidation of people seeking birth control and abortion. But the consequence of this is that "our" villains (drug dealers or the assassins of school masters ;) should not be exonerated in the same way either, no?
And if anyone disagrees with the laws that prohibit a particular conduct, one can work to change those laws through a democratic process instead taking their enforcement in their own hands. This is vigilantism - no different from what the Minutemen do on the US-Mexico border. But it is I who is being called a misanthrope by suggesting that law should be applied uniformly and free of personal biases or ideologies. Sometime I think you people are totally fucked up by your knee-jerk hatred that resembles the status quo - I think I need a break from this list for a while.
Wojtek